Tatyana McFadden doesn?t care if she?s scored the same way as other runners ? the ones without wheelchairs ? as long as her points count.
The 17-year-old Atholton High School junior, who is paralyzed from the waist down, won the right to score points for her school?s track team in a deal brokered with Howard County Public Schools in January.
But now McFadden, a two-time Paralympic medal winner, is suing the state Board of Education in U.S. District Court to make her points count in regional and state tournaments.
“I said, ?Tatyana, why don?t you just drop it now? You can compete in Howard County,? ” said Deborah McFadden, Tatyana?s mother.
“Her comment was, ?Nobody should have to fight like I did. I don?t want my sister to have to go through what I went through.? ”
Her sister, Hannah, 11, is an All-American wheelchair basketball player, a runner, an ice-hockey player ? “a jock, like her sister,” Deborah McFadden said.
State Department of Education spokesman William Reinhard said he could not comment on a pending case, as a policy.
Last year, McFadden?s attorneys at the Maryland Disability Law Center filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the Howard County school system, which allowed McFadden to practice and race other wheelchair athletes, but her points had no bearing on the team score.
In the settlement, she was conferred the same status as her teammates, but only in county meets.
“When it counts the most, students in wheelchairs do not count. This is precisely the kind of invidious discrimination that our civil rights laws seek to prohibit,” according to the recent lawsuit, which challenges the state on the basis of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
